58 rated into the streets of Port of Spain. Were the characters English, white people-or were they transformed into people I knew? Asking a question like that is a little like asking whether one dreams in color or in black-and-white. But I think I transferred the Dickens characters to people I knew. Though with a half or a quarter of my mind I knew that Dickens was all English, yet my Dickens cast, the cast in my head, was multiracial.) That ability to project what I read onto Trinidad- the colonial, tropical, multiracial world that was the only world I knew -dimInished as I grew older. It was partly as a result of my increasing knowledge, self-awareness, and my embarrassment at the workings of my fantasy It was also partly because of the writers; very few had the universal child's eye of Dickens. And that gift of fantasy became inoperable as soon as I came to England in 1950. When I was surrounded by the reality, English literature ceased to be universal, since it ceased to be the subject of fantasy. Now, in Wiltshire in winter, a writer now rather than a reader, I worked the child's fantasy the other way. I projected the solitude and emptiness and menace of my Africa onto the land around me. And when, four days later, the fog lifted and I went walking, something of the Africa of my story adhered to the land I saw. I walked out between the stripped beeches and between the old, un- trimmed yews, solid and dark green, and along the public road, past the cottages of flint and brick and thatch (but not yet seen clearly), and up the hill beside the windbreak to the barn at the top. I left all the marked public footpaths untrodden. I stuck to the downs, the grassed droveway, the walks around the farm at the bottom of the valley. And I continued easily in that rhythm of creation and walk: Af- rica in the writing in the morning, Wiltshire in the hour and a half or so after lunch. I projected Africa onto Wiltshire. Wiltshire-the Wiltshire I walked in-began to radiate or return Africa to me. So man and writer be- came one; the circle became complete. The Africa of my imagination was not the only source-Kenya, Uganda, the Congo, Rwanda. There was also Trinidad, to which I had gone back with a vision of romance, and where I had seen black men with threatening hair. It also now became Wiltshire. It was also the land created by my pain and exhaustion, expressed in the dream of the exploding head. A little over a year before, toward the end of the book about the New World, I had had the waking fantasy of myself as a corpse tossing lightly among the reeds at the bottom of a river (a river like the one in the Pre-Raphaelite painting of the drowned Ophelia, reproduced in the "Nelson's West Indian Reader" I had used in my elementary school in Trinidad; a river that turned out to be like the river in Wiltshire at the back of my cottage). Now, every night at some stage, an explosion in my head- occurring in a swift dream, giving me the conviction that this time I had to die, that this time I could not survive the great, continuing noise-awak- ened me. Such violence in my Africa, in the security of my stone cottage, where I had a coal fire every night! So much had gone into that Africa of my fan- tasy. As a point of rest, as a refresh- ment, a promise of release, I allowed myself to play, lightly, with the an- cient Mediterranean idea that had come to me from the de Chirico paint- ing "The Enigma of Arrival." The empty wharf; the glimpse of the mast of the ancient ship; the door- ways; the wicked, hypnotizing city to- ward which the two cloaked figures walk. For two days they had sailed, stay- ing close to the shore. On the third day the captain wakened his deck pas- senger and pointed to the city on the shore. "There. You are there. Your journey's over." But the passenger, looking at the city in the morning haze, seeing the unremarkable city de- bris floating out on the sea, unremark- able though the city was so famous- rotten fruit, fresh branches, bits of timber, driftwood-the passenger had a spasm of fear. He sipped the bitter honey drink the captain had given him; he pretended to get his things together; but he didn't want to leave the ship. But he would have to land. Such adventures were to come to him within the cutout, sunlit walls of that city. So eP.NST AUGUST II, 1986 classical, that city, seen from the ship; so alien within, so strange its gods and cults. My hero would end as a man on the run, a man passionate to get away to a clearer air. In desperation, he was to go through a doorway, and he was to find himself on the wharf again. But there was no mast above the walls of the wharf. No ship. His journey- his life's journey-had been made. It did not occur to me that the story that had come to me as a pleasant fantasy had already occurred, and was an as- pect of my own. A long time later, seeking, as al- ways, a synthesis of my material, my worlds, my own developing way of seeing, I thought about what I am writing now, an-d returned to live in the past. And it was actually during the writing of the first section that I remembered something from the first week of my time in London, when I was staying in Angela's boarding house. My writer's ambition and my social inexperience and anxiety had suppressed so much of that empty time, had expunged so much from my mem- ory. I used to go out doing the sights. It was what tourists did. And one day, somewhere in central London, perhaps along the Embankment, I saw some- one sitting on a bench below a statue. He was like part of the monument. He was in a dark suit: a small man, hot in the month of August. (The month and the weather were filled in later by the writer.) He was tired. He had been doing the sights and possibly having as little idea of what he was doing as I had: travel was a pleasure so much in the mind, so much something for later narrative. He was a man from the Columbia- a butler, I thought. Perhaps he had told me that on the ship; or perhaps I had made it up, finding in him a re- semblance to a butler in some film He was slightly offhand with me now. It was as the night watchman had said during the gala night on the Colum- bia, when he lectured those of us who were outside the dance lounge on the quirks of human behavior. After three days on a ship, everyone was faithless, he had said; on shore, though, people became themselves again and forgot shipboard romances, and even ac- quaintances. The butler was going on to France. A week there-no doubt in Paris: more sights-and then another ship would take him from Le Havre or Cherbourg back to New York, and the wandering holiday life would be over.